Chapter 58
AUSTRALIANS
They arrived in for the Melbourne conference in a turmoil of accusations and counter accusations concerning Mungo man compounded by Homo floresiensis. The world of anthropology had been turned upside down with Australian discoveries in a region that had at the best been a curious backwater of the science with Java Man and Australia that had an insignificant role to play in man’s evolution. The conference would be the centre stage for a battle of scientists who had been scorned by many of their colleagues who had discredited their work.
The question was focused on when had man appeared in their present day territory and in what form had he arrived from Indonesia.
To the east of the Wallace Line the greater Australian land mass with its continental shelf had not changed much in the last couple of million years, with the climatic cycles the sea rose and the sea fell transforming it into a vast island continent of Greater Australia, or Sahul, composed of New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. Homo sapiens had arrived from the Asian mainland by a series of jumps from Sundaland from island to island between seventy and one hundred thousand years ago according to archaeological and fossil evidence.
But what kind of man? Had a relic population of a much earlier human ancestor, Homo erectus, live in Australia. It was a question that burned in the minds of many Australian palaeoanthropologists.
Modern Homo sapiens appeared in Borneo 45,000 years ago which corresponds very approximately with the appearance of their fossils in Australia. But in Java their contemporaries, more ancient forms such as Ngandong man continued to exist until ten thousand years ago. Did they also reach Australia? The question remained open since no such fossils have been found on the southern continent…for the moment.
Many researchers speculated that Homo erectus might even have reached Australia a million years ago. How did they arrive? Like their successors on rafts or even in simple boats that could have been steered across one hundred kilometres of open sea from Timor. Today the coastal sites of that period have disappeared, inundated by the sea that has risen to a level of one hundred and twenty metres above the level of that time when during the most recent Ice Age a vast quantity of the earth waters was trapped, frozen into vast polar ice caps that stretched down towards the tropics.
When those first explorers arrived they found a strange land with plants and huge animals unlike anything they had known before. There were giant carnivorous reptiles, huge flightless birds and grazing marsupial wombats the size of a family car. It was the closest encounter that man had ever known with the cinema’s imaginary world of men and dinosaurs.
Australian researchers have calculated that if modern men arrived in Australia forty thousand years ago, then two thousand generations of continuous human occupation survived and learned to live with the many changes that occurred in the environment over that long period of time. A time when sea levels rose and fell, with droughts when rivers and vast lakes disappeared, then long periods of extreme heat or cold with glaciers in the southern part of Sahuland.
Certain anthropologists have put forward the hypothesis that separate waves of immigrants with distinctly different physical characteristics arrived in Australia over time and co-existed and interbred, based on the fact that robust fossil skeletons found in some areas are thousands of years younger than more gracile and ancient human remains.
The story began when a young Australian scientist, Greg Adcock, recovered DNA from Mungo Man’s bones that were estimated to be 60,000 years old. At that time the oldest DNA ever extracted was about 5,000 years old, but he succeeded in the exploit of extracting and sequencing mtDNA from the bones.
This was then compared with sequences of the same gene from the other early Australians, forty-five living Australian Aborigines, almost three-thousand-five-hundred people from around the world, two European Neanderthals, as well as chimpanzees and bonobos.
Based on the out-of-Africa model Mungo Man should have had a gene like present day humans, this was not the case. The team’s findings resulted in international uproar.
Several eminent scientists disputed the dating and the quality of the mtDNA throwing the scientific community into disarray. With the discoveries in Flores the dispute intensified with cries of ‘Bullshit!’ and ‘Nonsense!’ with the discoveries discredited as the work of mavericks seeking fame and glory.
For multiregionalists, each of the modern races descended from one of the archaic regional forms. Mongoloids differed from other modern people in the same manner that Homo pekinensis differed from its contemporary archaics, while Australoids bore a similitude with Javan Homo erectus. At the same time, the model contended that gene flow existed between different regional populations, with humanity evolving as a whole as each geographic kept its own specific racial characteristics.
‘The problem is that modern Homo sapien populations had reached even the most remote islands of Australasia about twenty thousand years ago,’ said Lundy.
‘So?’
‘Well he seems to have replaced all the other types of man on the way,’ Pierre added to enlighten Ennis
‘Island hopping?’
‘Yes, that’s one of the questions that has been getting a lot of attention in recent years, the spread of man into Australia, were the first men who arrived there Homo sapiens or something older? Remember it’s a big continent and even greater when it was Sahuland. Some of the discoveries are very interesting and surprising, and no doubt they’re only the beginning. For example on island of Aru in the Muaku group off the west coast of Irian Jaya.’
‘Indonesia then.’
‘Yes, a burial site was discovered from a period when those islands weren’t islands. They were part of the continent we call Sahuland, or the greater Australian land mass, that included New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. The continents of Sunda and Sahul were at their greatest about 18,000 years ago and when sea levels were between one and two hundred metres lower than today.’
‘The skeleton of a young female was found in a limestone cave at a place called, Lemdubu. It has been dated at around 18,000 years old, that was a time when that continent was much colder and drier than now, and sea levels were at their lowest.’
‘So it was during the ice age.’
‘Yes and no, I mean there was no ice here. It began about 120,000 years ago followed by cycles of warming and cooling. The polar ice caps extended southwards or northwards here below the equator reaching their maximum somewhere between 28,000 and 19,000 years ago. After that they retreated and the climate became more stable about 10,000 years ago and the sea levels stabilised about 6,000 years back at today’s level.’
‘Was it cold here then?’
‘No, but temperatures may have been five to ten degrees lower than they are today and the Lemdubu Cave is surrounded by rainforests. What’s interesting is that the temperatures rose and fell rapidly sometimes climbing five degrees in less than a century having a huge effect on the ecological system of the whole region.’
‘This Lemdubu woman, was she Homo erectus?’
‘No in fact she already possessed the distinctive features of the Australoid populations.’
‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the previous populations disappeared. Though early human populations from what was the eastern end of the human range during most of the Pleistocene epoch became extinct around the same time as the Neanderthals, they were archaic Homo sapiens.’
‘No, but the evidence is that they were gradually replaced, for example in China where there is one of the greatest collections of fossil man this can be clearly seen, though those who adhere to the multi-region theory have other ideas such as Wolpoff.’
‘Who?’ asked Ennis.
‘Wolpoff, an American anthropologist, and also a keen supporter of the multi-regional theory. His idea is something to the effect that ancient humans shared genes across wide regions of the world, and were not made extinct by one “lucky group” that later evolved into mo
dern man. He remarked that the fossils clearly shows that more than one ancient group survived.’
‘The evidence that a small group originating in a single geographic region, like Awash River region in northern Ethiopia, replaced the world’s entire population of early humans has not been proved for the moment, though many believe that all living humans have descended from such a small group around 160,000 years ago,’ said Lundy.
‘Perhaps but that means that all other early human groups, whose fossils date from this time back a couple of million years, became extinct, some kind of prehistoric genocide or something like that.’
‘Well some geneticians have suggested that modern man evolved from a mixture of ancient African immigrants and primitive humans that existed in other regions, who had also come from Africa but at a very much earlier date. In other words it is thought that there were at least two such migrations, one about 600,000 years ago and the other about 95,000 years ago, which seems to be confirmed by genetic data,’ explained Lundy
Two days Ennis was to fly to Beijing with a transit in Hongkong. He had two things in mind, the first his meeting with Professor Zhang, at the Research Institute of Chinese Pottery & Porcelain, it was important to obtain more data on the origin of the wreck. It was urgent and he had giving too much time to erectus and not enough to the auction of cargo from the wreck scheduled to take place in Hongkong in just four weeks. The news from Joe was that things were going fine and the first shipment to Hongkong for the showing before the auction was due to be flown out in ten days. The second and more immediate thing was the Beijing conference.
This would coincide with the publication in Nature of Professor Lundy’s analysis of Homo borneensis that would have the effect of a bomb shell on the unsuspecting delegates attending the 4th Asian Anthropological Conference in Beijing.
The Lost Forest Page 59